


Security

by fallentemple



Series: striving for the sun [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Ben Solo Gets a Hug, Ben is really in love with her, Ben lives, F/M, Fix-It, Fluff, Leia has a cameo - Freeform, Light Angst, Sometimes you can let people have a happy ending, The Force, looking at you disney
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-11
Updated: 2020-05-11
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:08:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24124912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallentemple/pseuds/fallentemple
Summary: Maybe that was why he had latched onto her so suddenly and completely. For the first time, in the long years that he had been alive, someone had actually seen him. And he had seen her.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Series: striving for the sun [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1740715
Comments: 2
Kudos: 34





	Security

All his life has felt like a cruel game, one where he was one step behind and another was two steps ahead - just out of reach and untouchable no matter what he did. The backs of others was what he was used to seeing. His father, off on some adventure. His mother, a senator of the New Republic. Both eager to send him away to his uncle, whose gaze was always drawn to a past long gone and best left buried. None had bothered to look back when he had needed them to most.

Maybe that was why he had latched onto her so suddenly and completely. For the first time in the long years that he had been alive, someone had actually seen  _ him _ . And he had seen her. That moment in the hut, only a year ago yet so far behind, had left him vulnerable and her rejection in the throne room had left him fractured in a way that he refused to show others. So he had hidden it behind rage and then cool indifference, even as her eyes - so hopeful yet broken - were his final thought before he fell asleep at night. Those eyes that finally saw  _ him _ .

But she wasn’t seeing him now, and it felt like all of his nightmares had come true. Bile rose in his throat and his entire body felt like it might have been lit aflame as pain coursed through him. And there, at his very core, was a hole as despairingly vacant as her gaze.

How was it that here, at the end of all things when they had finally won, he had lost?

“Rey,” Ben tries to choke out, holding her as delicately in his arms as he can as the hand not supporting her comes to cup her face. The word is barely - if even at all - coherent, but he can’t bring himself to care as he shudders and softly strokes a thumb across her cheek. 

He could feel it, the moment that she had gone - he wouldn’t call it what it really was, he refused to - but trying to associate this cold emptiness with the bright burning sun that she was seemed near impossible. 

A planet was nothing without its sun, just a lonely nothingness left suspended in space. And he had always seemed to orbit her, never quite touching yet never gone either. All that he was now, was owed to her. 

And he was fractured.

Maybe it would be easier, if he felt pain. Pain was manageable, an old friend that he had been taught to welcome rather than reject. But instead there was a hole that went down to his very soul, as if half of him was completely missing and what was left had nothing to hold it together anymore.

“Please,” It comes out half broken, turned into a sob rather than a word really. He isn’t sure who he’s pleading with as he turns his eyes from her empty ones to the open sky above. Somewhere, far beyond the edges of this planet, the stars are there to greet him. He can’t see them but he can feel them. Space had always been a place that he was familiar with, but now it feels daunting and terrifying. He can’t face the universe like this.

He can’t face the universe without her.

He would die for her.

So he places the hand that had been cradling her face on her stomach and he closes his eyes and he  _ reaches _ . 

Ben Solo reaches out with all of the light left in him, and the light reaches back.

It’s not thousands of Jedi past, not even ten of them, but there is one. Her presence engulfs him like a shield, seeping into his skin and warming him to the core even as he pushes all the energy that he has left to Rey. It reminds him of late nights as a young boy, barely three, when his mother still pressed kisses to his forehead before he went to sleep. It reminds him of cold days when they would sit together and she would wrap a blanket around his shivering shoulders. It reminds him of her promises to come back every time she had to leave him behind.

It reminds him of everything he had never gotten the chance to say. 

His eyes open, glowing blue greeting him and Ben thinks that perhaps he is doomed to join Rey where she has gone. Why else then, would one of his final failures present itself to him now more than ever? And had it not been failure, when he had been deemed the son who would never return home in time?

“Ben,” His mother speaks softly even as she kneels in front of him, dead as the body he cradles in his arms still, and her ghostly hand reaches out to rest over his own. 

He deserves this torment, he thinks in that moment as he breathes out a quiet, “Mom.”

When was the last time that he had called Leia Organa his mother? A long time ago now, before it was tortured out of him by Snoke, carefully and methodically until he had no parents left except the memories of them walking away.

But she’s not walking away from him now, as she smiles and the wrinkles around her eyes crinkle. “Ben,” She says his name again like it’s a mantra that she has long learned to repeat. Nothing could prepare him for her next word, though, as suddenly energy that had been drained is flooding through him and she squeezes his hand (it should be impossible, but she does it anyhow and simply tells him, “ _ Live _ .”

Suddenly, he does not feel so fractured.

She disappears then and another hand, solid and warm, covers his own, and the body he cradles jerks and he turns his head downwards just in time to see Rey’s eyes open.

His breath catches in his throat as he uses that same hand to help pull her to sit, the hand which had been cradling the back of her head remaining there.

There is a stark comparison between the eyes that had been so empty and devoid of all life and the ones that stare back at him now. They’re beautiful -  _ she  _ is beautiful - and once again he is suffering the horrifying ordeal of being known.

He isn’t quite sure anyone has ever looked at him like she does now, with such reverence and amazement (and, though he would not dare say it, something far more important). There is a smile that teases at her lips as she slowly but surely brings one of her own hands to cradle the side of his face tenderly. “Ben,” Her lips speak his name with such gentleness that he’s almost afraid he’ll fall apart. Her eyes seem to be searching , for what he doesn’t know.

One moment they are staring at each other, and the next they are kissing each other.

He kisses her like he is a dying man who has found salvation. She kisses him like he is the sun and she is the planet. Ben is unsure of where he ends and she begins, their minds melding together and in that moment all he can think is that  _ this _ is how it was always meant to be. 

Two who are one.

It doesn’t last anywhere near as long as it should, but soon they are pulling away and her forehead is pressed into his as they breathe deeply. His own face splits into a grin and a laugh (when was the last time he laughed?) escapes from between his lips as joy courses through his veins.

She breathes deep and her eyes peer into his own. “You came,” She says it as if it’s the most miraculous thing that anyone has done for her, and his heart may always bleed for the little girl who was left behind on Jakku. 

“You told me-” His words seem to catch in his throat and he takes a moment before trying again, “It was Ben, it was always Ben. I was just too much of a fool to see it.”

Kylo Ren would always be a part of him, the sinister part in the back of his mind that he would never quite shake. He would spend decades atoning for the sins that he had committed as Kylo Ren, but Kylo Ren had begun to die the day that he killed his father. And Kylo Ren had finally, truly, died when she had run him through with his own lightsaber in one breath and healed him with the next. 

Had he ever been Kylo Ren with her, or had he always been Ben Solo screaming for help?

“I couldn’t leave you to fight alone. I-” The man continues speaking, but in the end he can’t seem to get the words out. He doesn’t deserve her, may never deserve this other half of his soul that pulled him out of his own darkness with all of her might. He doesn’t deserve whatever love may have started to form in her, but he’ll never stop trying to earn it.

“I know,” Rey saves him from having to try to save the words, her gaze understand and her face kind as fingertips trace over his cheek, “You saved me.”

“Not all by myself,” Ben admits, thinking of his mother's loving gaze and her energy coursing through him, “Mom helped too.”

She looks amazed, and ever so slightly confused, “Leia?”

His response for her is a nod, even as he mourns the mother who had saved them both, in the end.

Rey’s arms wrap around him the next moment, pulling him into a firm hug and her head is buried in his neck. He can feel her breath as he lowers his head to her shoulder and lets himself cradle her to him for the second time that day (had he ever stopped the first time, though?). There is security to be found there in her arms, no matter how short lived it may be. Pain courses through his body, drawing attention to a leg that was likely broken and other undoubtedly present fractures and bruises. Remnants of being thrown off of a cliff. Part of him almost finds it funny, that in the end the way Sidious had thought it would stop him from saving Rey.

But he’s sure that he’s not the only one feeling pain, and he can feel whispers of Rey’s through the bond. He would argue that she most definitely had it worse (empty eyes would always haunt his nightmares now), and if there was any energy left to spare he would make sure she walked out of here with no wounds left to be seen. Things were never that easy, though, so he contented himself with just holding her even as the world above them rattled with crashing ships.

The Resistance would win this battle, and the war. 

“We need to get out of here,” She whispers into his neck, the words muffled but clear nonetheless.

“And go where?” He asks her, unable to help the slight fear that finds its way into his mind. Would the Resistance shoot him on sight, if he were to show up to their base after all of this? Would they even know his face? Some would, of course, and he was certain that didn’t increase the likelihood of him walking away with his life after fighting to gain it in the first place. 

_ I won’t let them kill you _ , Rey whispers into his mind as she moves to press her forehead to his once again.

“How will you stop them?” Is the only response he can manage, because he has already put his faith into her with that one thought. He had been ready to die for her moments ago, but maybe that was easy. Living? That would be far harder.

But he was willing to do it for her.

“I have my ways,” The words are laced with amusement, and it’s a wonder that she has any at all considering what they had just gone through. His own adrenaline is starting to fade away with every passing moment. Her next question is serious, “Where do you want to go?”

Did he even know where he wanted to go? For years, he had been searching unknowingly for a place that he could call safe and his own. He’d found shelter in busy cities and then quiet Jedi schools and then the vast empty cold of space. Now, though? Now, he wanted to go, “Home.”

“And where is that?” It’s so soft, the way she asks it. Like her entire life depends upon it. And maybe it does, the years of thinking she had just been left behind on Jakku. But he could never leave her now, not even if death itself tried to separate them. It had tried once already, and he was sure in years to come it would try again. It wouldn’t succeed. 

Home itself was such a foreign idea to him, like something he had forbidden himself from thinking of since he had put on that mask for the first time and named himself  _ Kylo Ren _ . But here, looking into her eyes, somehow he knew that he had already found the answer.

“Wherever you are.”

**Author's Note:**

> this is going to be one of four one shots written for this short series! i am perpetually upset about the ending and therefore i am pretending it did not happen.


End file.
